


Gimme Danger

by fluorescentgrey



Series: Moonage Daydream [5]
Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Glam Rock, M/M, velvet goldmine au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:40:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24472189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: "Meaning is not in things, but in between them." James and Francis do some opposition research.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames, Commander James Fitzjames/Cornelius Hickey, Cornelius Hickey/Sgt Solomon Tozer
Series: Moonage Daydream [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1773430
Comments: 16
Kudos: 20





	Gimme Danger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [floggingink](https://archiveofourown.org/users/floggingink/gifts).



Sol came in while Hickey was doing his makeup. He was in the old Royal Marines jacket they’d found at Camden Market, leather pants, no shirt, and someone had smeared a palmful of glitter over his chest. He looked dashing. Hickey looked him up and down in the mirror. He blushed and turned his head away, but it was getting somewhere.

“I have a surprise for you,” he said.

Hickey traced a stick of black kohl under his eye. Sol was watching him, as he always did, during this part, with a kind of confused frustration. Maybe tonight is finally the night, Hickey dared to think. He would not have speculated on something so serious, but he had done a few lines of coke, and the universe was spinning off behind his eyes in kaleidoscopic patterns showing potentialities and futures as yet unfulfilled, chiefly the one wherein they went back to Sol’s flat and sealed the metaphorical deal.

“I don’t like surprises,” he said.

Sol sat beside him so that Hickey could see his face in the mirror. There was glitter in the web of fine loose hairs between his eyebrows and hairline. “You’ll like this one,” he said.

“What is it?”

“Crozier is here.”

Hickey shivered. A chill of anticipation passed up his spine, as palpable as if someone had touched him. He wondered if Sol could see. “Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier is here?”

“Yes. James Fitzjames’ manager. The man who used to sign our paychecks. He’s here. I saw him at the bar.”

“No surprises there.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

Make a great show of seducing you, Hickey thought.

“What happened to those boots,” he said instead.

“What boots?”

“You know! The leather boots. James’s boots.”

“You’ve got a pair of James’s boots? They must be like clown shoes on you.”

Hickey was going to make him regret that. “I took them,” he said, “when we left, of course.”

“I didn’t know you did that.”

“Well I don’t make a habit of parading around in them.” Hickey got up, makeup unfinished, and set about digging through the trunk of costume supplies. He’d taken a few things from James, actually, but they weren’t necessarily noticeable things — mostly caftans and gowns from his freak-folk days — except for the boots, which were iconic. And monogrammed.

“Were you saving them for a special occasion?”

“I suppose I was,” Hickey said, finding them in the bottom of the trunk. They were still in the box from Terry de Havilland. “Help me get them on, will you?”

Sol opened the box while Hickey got into the only pants he figured would work, which were skin-tight velvety white corduroy. There was a pink tinge to Sol’s cheeks when he turned back around, which meant he’d been watching Hickey’s ass during the arduous process. Things were looking better and better.

The boots were iridescent green leather printed to look like the skin of a dragon or some fanciful snake. They stood up tall on a three-inch platform heel of bright silver rubber. James’s monogram was up by the loops that were supposed to help you pull them on — it was silver, too, to catch the light.

“How are you going to walk in these,” Sol said.

They were two sizes too big at least. “I’ll manage,” Hickey said. “Help me get them on.”

He shoved a rolled-up sock into the toe of each boot, put stockings on, nice ones, from the lingerie counter at Liberty, and then he and Sol wrestled each foot through the stiff, narrow calf. It was probably too much to hope that something like this would be sexually re-enacted later, Hickey thought, though he knew Sol was hung. First of all, he didn’t even want to think about the process of trying to get these fucking boots off. God knew how James had ever gotten them on.

Finally it was over. His ankles hurt already. He stepped back far enough to look at himself in the mirror. “Those are insane,” Sol said, but he sounded like he’d been hit over the head with a Looney Tunes mallet. “You’re insane.”

“I know that, love.”

He had put off wearing the boots for so long, he figured, because he didn’t think he wanted any of James’s power. He wanted his own power, and he wanted his own power to supersede James’s power. If he could supersede James’s power, he could supersede Crozier’s power, and Franklin’s power, and the entire music industry’s power, and perhaps, as such, the power of popular culture altogether.

But now, with the boots on, he didn’t look like James Fitzjames. He didn’t feel like James Fitzjames. He felt like a shipwreck of James Fitzjames on the shores of AC/DC. He felt like a marauder and a cannibal. He felt like himself.

“What else are you going to wear,” Sol said.

“Jacket from school.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.” He looked Sol up and down again. “We’ll be like yin and yang.”

“I like that,” said Sol, softly.

“Yeah. So do I.”

\---

\--

-

-

\--

\---

As he had been doing now for many years, because of the terrible curse, he felt sometimes, he followed James into the darkness. It was easy to see where he was going, even in said darkness, because of all the glitter and sequins on his person. He just could not be gotten to do anything surreptitiously. That word wasn’t in his sizable vocabulary nor anywhere to be found in the constabulary of personas he could otherwise throw on in the time it took lesser men to select from amongst their beige tweeds. And he wore the darkness cast around the shapely shoulders the way a duchess would wear a milk stole. He manipulated it to hide his face because he wished it so. And he stood aside so that Francis could pay their way at the door. 

It had been many years and a handful of gold records since they had come to this club. If Francis wanted to think about it, which he didn’t, he was pretty sure this was the first place he had seen James, a lifetime ago now, on a night out under invitation from Ross, back when he had desired above all to be made partner at some stuffy firm in Holborn. Anyway, if this suspicion was true, this place had been the end of just about all desire but for the one which had been with him since. To keep from thinking about it, he went to the bar and ordered two double whiskeys. James had discovered some acquaintance by the grand piano and was expostulating on whatever he tended to expostulate upon in the company of fellow queens. The bartender brought Francis’s whiskeys with a wink; he downed them both, asked about a third. 

“Mr. Crozier,” said a scouser to his left. God but that whiskey had better have been coming. It was Sol Tozer. “Didn’t expect to see you, sir.” 

“Yes,” Francis said, “well.” 

Sol’s handsome mouth crinkled. “Opposition research?” 

“Suppose so.” 

Tozer downed whatever clear swill he was being provided from beneath the counter. “I'm pleased you’re here,” he said. “The boys will be very pleased.” 

Crozier shuddered, hopefully mostly internally. “I’m sure,” he said. 

Not that he would really know this, because he wasn’t a real barrister, as everybody in his former class with whom he still communicated had not hesitated to remind him, but this was what he expected it would have been like to meet with opposing counsel: the somewhat-better-heeled legal representative of the sworn enemy who must be crushed at all costs. 

“Enjoy the show,” said Tozer, meaning it. 

“Break a leg,” said Crozier, meaning it as well. Watching the broad back disappear into the crowd. Wondering if he had yet been seduced. A stupid thing to wonder, because obviously he had. 

“Was that Solomon,” James said, coming up at Francis’s quarter, pinning a flower to the breast of his jacket. 

“Who gave you that?”

“Somebody, I don't know,” James said. It cast a delicate butter light against his face. Francis looked away. “Was it?” 

“He’s gone back there to tell them all we’re here.” 

James just blinked at him. Of course, he had come here to be seen. He would not like to hear that he was of a not dissimilar breed to the person they had come here to see. 

The room was packed so tight with elated bodies that by the time the lights went down the small of Francis’s back was pressed sweatily against the lacquered bar. In the new darkness the crowd screamed in near-fulfilled bliss. James was applauding with an air of rehearsed reluctance. Francis turned around and motioned to the bartender for another whiskey. The lights went up on the minute stage and another scream washed the room like a strike of roaring static on a badly tuned radio. The drummer, Des Voeux, appeared, and there was another scream, then the bassist, Gibson, looking even more strung out than he had when Crozier had seen him last, and, finally, Tozer, who had traded his hockey jersey for a vintage military coat and little else. They were beglammed and beglittered and sparkled like a piece of broken glass in the dirt. A kind of fools’-gold filth. 

Tozer hit a primitive, muscly riff and the room staggered under the weight of the feedback, and the adversary stepped into the light from the shadow. Beside him, Francis felt the muscle stiffen in James’s shoulder beneath his skin-tight bolero coat. 

The adversary was not necessarily a person of great beauty. In most lights, he looked rather plain and vulgar, like a street preacher, or, as he had indeed been when Francis had first met him, a skinflint Catholic school runaway who lived in a squat and owned a single piss-smelling tweed jacket. He was possessed of quite light eyes, almost sheer, giving the observer the impression that they might see into his brain. The rest of him gave the observer the impression that they would not like what they found there. He stalked like a hunting cat to the center of the stage and set about sloppily jerking off the microphone, and in the process Francis saw he was wearing an old pair of James’s boots — green snakeskin, from Terry de Havilland. 

Francis had been wondering what had happened to those. The sight of them made him feel hot. 

“The bloody cheek,” James said, despite the fact that he had no leg to stand on, considering that the adversary had likely taken the boots during the (allegedly) single well-publicized occasion of their sexual congress. Indeed, he was blushing. The bloody cheek, Francis thought. 

The boots gave the adversary another few inches of height but he was rather an elastic and delicate man. His hair was red, his pants were white velvet. As he had done in the days when he played keys in James’s band, he wore no shirt and his old school blazer, from which he had cut the insignia with a knife. He was fit like a street fighter and pale as milk. The crowd washed up to his feet like a rogue wave, and he saw them and did not see them: the light eyes filtered the room as though it were all a dream. Either he had stolen the distant and unbothered thing from James or he was on enough coke to think he was Christ. Neither would have been surprising. Then he began to sing. It was of no use trying to sing like James if you were not James, and the adversary knew it — though he was not quite as smart as he thought he was — so he had taken a page out of the book of Marc Bolan or Iggy Pop. Moaning, screaming, intoning in turn. Francis had never quite understood the metaphor “like a cat in heat” until this precise moment. Every breath that entered his body and every sound that left it reshaped him into some living permutation of bottomless need. 

Francis turned to James. He looked turned on and furious. Serves him right, Francis thought. 

At the exact moment within the song where this would obviously happen, the adversary ceded the spotlight to Tozer to play a hollowing, primitive guitar solo. He ceded said spotlight in metaphor only, because he quickly collapsed to his knees as though he had been struck by some invisible dart. Searching for the wound, he dragged a slender, artful hand feelingly over his chest toward the low-slung waist of the white pants, and, finding nothing, he evidently decided to give himself a real one. Francis turned toward the bartender for another whiskey, and when he turned back around, having downed it, the adversary had knelt at Tozer’s feet and pressed his mouth against the pickups of Tozer’s vintage turtleshell Fender Jaguar, evincing from the instrument even more primeval sounds. James had never done anything quite like this, but he had gotten in the adversary’s lap at the grand piano, which Francis would never forget nor let James live down. James looked like he was going to say “the bloody cheek" again, but his mouth was a little open and his face was still red, even in the darkness. It was easier to watch the stage, where the adversary was fairly humping Tozer’s boot, looking up into Tozer’s face, hands down the back of his leather pants. The noise was sharp and cleansing, washing down, like a hard rain. Gibson and Des Voeux watched the display impassively, driving the rhythm forward inexorably as though something like this regularly happened in the practice space, though Francis knew it was likely they were glazed with drugs. 

When the adversary pulled away, he had cut his lip or something on the guitar strings, and blood spilled out of his mouth, over his chin, and onto his chest, as though he were some kind of overzealous vampire. He crept away from Tozer, shakily, breathing hard, breathing the breath of everybody else in the crowd, because nobody else was breathing at all, and struggled to his feet, shaking, palming blood over his naked chest. At last he grabbed the microphone again, wrapping it in his bloody hand, lifting it to his bloody mouth. There was a brutal savagery in his eye now. As much as he pretended to be aloof and damaged he knew exactly what he was doing; he always had; Francis saw him… 

“I can’t watch any more of this,” James said in Francis’ ear, shattering the disgusted and aroused reverie. 

“It was you wanted to come!” 

“Well I’ve changed my mind.” 

He wasn’t sure whether this would look like a gesture of defeat or a stately kiss-off to the adversary, but Francis followed James toward the door, feeling like a hermitish hunchback in the velvet majesty of his wake, patchouli and old dust, through the reluctantly parting crowd. He never watched the audience closely when James performed, though perhaps he should have. It was very trying to look away from James when he was performing. He wondered if James’s crowds watched him with the same elated fear, the same gleeful anticipation of imminent trainwreck, with which they viewed the adversary. He would have said he planned to answer this question the next time James played live, had James not recently sworn in a BBC interview that he had had premonitions of his own death onstage and as such would be “pulling a late-stage Beatles” and pivoting to a recording-only project. 

“It would’ve been better if they were terrible,” James observed over the squalling noise as they climbed the stairs to the street. 

How could they be terrible, Francis didn’t remind him. You in your infinite wisdom deigned to allow every last one of those degenerates to play in your very own glam rock beat combo for eighteen months. Most of the time, it was easier not to say anything at all. 

“I suppose I wish I thought of it,” James said, as they waited on the corner for Jopson to bring the car around. He was doing the dejected voice he did when he needed to be reassured but couldn’t bring himself to ask for it. 

“You did,” Francis told him for the hundred thousandth time. Not drunk enough, unspeakably tired. “It’s an altogether cheap vulgarization of your original form.” 

“I never broke a tooth onstage.” 

“You couldn’t,” Francis told him, not unregretfully. The limo appeared at the end of the street, just black shapes in the moonlight, rattling on the cobbles. “I wouldn’t let you.” 

“Why not?” 

“Don’t goad me.” 

“But — ”

“For god’s sake, James,” Francis said. “Get in the bloody car.” 

\---

\--

-

**Author's Note:**

> this glam rock AU is a joint concept with chloe aka [reserve](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reserve) and a proof of concept for a story that may eventually be longer. 
> 
> [incredible artwork for this story](https://twitter.com/areyougonnabe/status/1267356265723817986) by allegra aka [attheborder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/attheborder)
> 
> the song that hickey and the band are playing is [penetration](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MPvJYZUSuI) by iggy pop. 
> 
> this was written for meg in exchange for her donations to organizations supporting [racial justice protestors across america right now.](https://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/619595561119711232/yeats-infection-yeats-infection-ok-everybody) i'm doing an ongoing fundraising drive for these organizations - if you'd like to take part, and i hope you will, please give and message me with proof (on tumblr or at fgreyfx @ gmail) and i will write you something.


End file.
